As florists and restaurants prepare to make their annual February 14 killing, Angela Barnett calls time on our cultural obsession with finding 'The One'.
“You’re not my soulmate.”
That was the line that stopped the barbecue. My friend looked at her husband and smiled, while we all held our breath.
If he wasn’t her soulmate, who was?
“I have many soulmates,” she said. “You’re my mating mate.”
We all breathed a sigh of relief but her husband wasn’t smiling. He looked a bit shattered.
Growing up, we're all led to believe that we have a “soulmate” out there and we should spend our formative years trying to find them. The One.
But what if happiness depends on not finding one soulmate, but many? Or on us becoming mates with our own souls?
The soulmate myth started as a heteronormative one – it's a close cousin, really, of "family values". And it’s true that once you procreate with someone it feels soulful because you made another human being. It is cosmically wonderful. Your matter produced more matter with their matter. That matters. Nothing else matters! And then you bring the baby home.
Romance, meet reality
This part is not so much soulful, but soul-crushing. The 3am feeds. The pumpkin-poo-up-the-back shart from the cot. The tiredness that eats into your bones.
After all that divine, celestial rutting and you are reduced to shushing each other so you don’t wake the baby. Some days you feel empty. You don’t look to your partner and think, "Aren’t we amazing for finding each other’s souls?". You think, "It’s your turn to get up, stop pretending to be asleep’.
Once through the loaded diaper years, you spend a lot of time figuring out how to raise what you both created. You’re not having discussions about the astroverse or the meaning of life. You’re discussing logistics, meals, and who forgot to buy toilet paper. Add into the mix unreliable hormones – yours and the teenagers' – aging parents, waning careers, and freakouts about your retirement and you find yourself looking at your "soulmate" and thinking, who are you anyway?
Blame the Romantic movement
British philosopher Alain de Botton, says the Romantic movement of the late-18th to mid-19th century unrealistically raised all our expectations. “The romantic person instinctively sees marriage [or partnership] in terms of emotions, but what a couple actually gets up to together over a lifetime has much more in common with the workings of a small business," he wrote in The Guardian. "They must draw up work rosters, clean, chauffeur, cook, fix, throw away, mind, hire, fire, reconcile, and budget.” It’s work.
The romantic movement also pilfered the word soulmate for its own gains. Looking at its origins, soulmate comes from a 16th-century Jewish poem where it appeared as Yedid (meaning mate) and Nefesh (meaning soul) and was a declaration of love for one’s creator. The first time it was used to refer to a love interest was when poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, wrote it in a letter in 1822.
Coleridge had a lifelong addiction to opium so perhaps he was high when he bent the meaning of "soulmate", not knowing this would launch a belief throughout Western culture that for each of us there was one (and only one) perfect match loitering out there, just waiting to be discovered in a bar or on a dating site. And spruiking a multi-billion Valentine’s Day industry off the back of it – Americans alone spent US$26 billion (NZ$46.5 billion) on Valentine's gifts and gestures in 2023.
Smug Marrieds cosily locked in with their One can make that life seem like an exclusive club. But is it a club worth joining? I have been married twice and many of my friends are married or in long-term relationships, most with children, and everyone I know needs a variety of people in their lives. Our mating mates can't nourish our souls all the time in every way and we can't nourish theirs. It’s too much pressure. We all need different mates.
I wish somebody had told me when I was a young adult: long relationships are hard, enjoy the short ones and instead of hunting for The One, go and experience a variety of ones.
The soulmate myth is false advertising. Plus it goes hand-in-hand with our centuries-old views about monogamy. We wait for The One then stick with them no matter what. The Bible doesn’t use the term soulmate as it was written well before the Romantic movement but it calls a marriage "a one-flesh" relationship. Like when you caramelise sugar and butter together and you get toffee.
So once you’ve found your soulmate, your one-flesh, you must hang on to this one for dear life. For the sake of your soul. If the marriage doesn’t work out long term (and over half end in divorce so it’s not an unreasonable assumption) then is your soul left flailing around, forever searching for its other half of flesh while gnawing on its knuckles? No wonder people fear being single and stay trapped in bad relationships.
Virginia Woolf said of the soul: “Beyond the difficulty of communicating oneself, there is the supreme difficulty of being oneself. This soul, or life within us, by no means agrees with the life outside us.”
The life within us — whether you call it a soul, inner child, voice, the force, or wairua — is for us to tap into. No mate can help us. Nobody else is rummaging around inside these bodies and minds we have. Nobody else can touch our souls, or even see them. Some aren’t sure we even have souls, but the only person who can truly know our souls is us.
This Valentine’s Day, enough with soulmates. How about many mates, romantic or otherwise, to help us enjoy this one precious life we get to live?
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